Despite the disappearance of their empire, Puppeteers products continue to revolutionize the technology of Human Space. Famous examples of their technology are Stepping Disks, the Quantum II Hyperdrive, General Products Hulls and Hyperwave.
The caution of the Puppeteers makes them unwilling to use any products but their own. The reliability of The General Products Corporation drive systems, legendary hulls, stasis fields, and other items, combined with the Puppeteer's reputation of universal cowardice, has made other races share that faith.
All Puppeteer artifacts share the same features of design. Furniture, weapons, and tools are perfectly smooth, as if made of frozen mercury; there are no sharp edges or corners. All work with unobtrusive perfection and are equally expensive, but worth the additional cost.
A puppeteer constructed Flashlight laser.
The creations of the Puppeteers are often multifunctional to the point where the user feels there is a deliberate attempt to hide more dangerous features. For instance, the flashlight laser can be used as a normal electric torch or as a deadly weapon. The Puppeteer disintegrator has a double aperture, one for suppressing the negative charge of an atom, the other positive; when both barrels are used, an electric arc creates a powerful explosion. The caution of the Puppeteers does not allow the race to believe such "additional features" are weapons, as they always avoid anything dangerous. However, if someone in their employ finds a lethal use for a harmless device, especially as a means to provide the Puppeteer with protection, then that just means the device is better designed than planned.
Or so it is said
General Products Corporation
Though many of their engineering secrets were bought from the Outsiders, the Puppeteers have the most advances science in Known Space. The General Products Corporation was created by the Puppeteers to trade and sell alien goods with other species.
Direct contact with humans did not begin until the latter portion of the 25th Century, after the First Man-Kzin war. The Outsider hyperdrive which ended the war also gave mankind the ability to explore surrounding systems and end the vulnerable isolation of established colonies. There was a huge market for safer spaceships, which the Puppeteers were expert at providing. The Puppeteers established offices on Jinx and We Made It, and by the mid-2600s, the General Products Corporation employed over 2 billion humans.
The Puppeteers' sudden departure from Known Space caused a stock market crash that almost ended humanity's interstellar trade.
General Product's Hulls
Hulls made by General Products are infallible by Puppeteer guarantee. In fact a ship with a General Products Hull could fly straight through the outer layers of a star and the hull would not have a scratch, the ships drives and occupants may be a cooked mush, but what the hell, the hull'd still be there!
The hull's are pervious to visible light and UV rays however,
so a laser could be fired through the hull to destroy the propulsion system
of the spacecraft within. But a wise pilot would never let his ship get in that
sort of peril. 
The only thing that can harm a General Products Hull is anti-matter which destroys
the bonding of the dense molecular structure of the hull.
The General Products Hulls come in Four Sizes:
- No.1Hull (globe the size of a basketball, suitable for probes).
- No.2 Hull (a cylinder three hundred feet long and twenty feet through, pointed at both ends and with a slight wasp-waisted constriction near the tail).
- No.3 (cylinder with rounded ends and a flattened belly).
- No.4 Hull (a transparent sphere a thousand feet in diameter).
Though the Puppeteers make invulnerable spaceship hulls, they refuse to equip warships.
Homeworld
The
Puppeteer Homeworld, is not a normal planet, it is not in a normal star system,
is it flying through space just under the speed of light. When the Puppeteer
exodus took place, rather than flee their home,
THEY TOOK IT WITH THEM!
The home planet is completely covered with buildings of all shape and manner. To feed the one trillion puppeteers on the planet four farming worlds are needed. All five planets are arranged in a Kempler Rosette, appearing from a distance to be a five-pointed star. The planets are all of equal size. The farming worlds were circled by strings of tiny glaring lights: orbital suns giving off artificial yellow-white sunlight. The homeworld has no orbital lights. It glows by its own light, in patches the shapes of continents and the colours of sunlight. This may seem incredulous to the reader, but as Nessus said in Ringworld,
".....We have had much practice in the moving of worlds........""But how?" said Louis Wu.
"I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat. Total conversion of energy had rid us of all waste products of civilisation, save that one. We had no choice but to move our world outward from its primary."
"Was that not dangerous?"
"Very. There was much madness that year. For that reason it is famous in our history. But we had purchased a reactionless, inertialess drive from the Outsiders. You may have guessed their price. We are still paying in installments. We had moved two agricultural worlds; we had experimented with other, useless worlds of our system using the Outsider drive.
"In any case, we did it. We moved our world.
"In later millennia, our numbers reached a full trillion. The dearth of natural sunlight had made it necessary to light our streets during the day, producing more heat. Our sun was misbehaving.
"In short, we found that a sun was a liability rather than an asset. We moved our world to a tenth of a light year's distance, keeping the primary only as an anchor. We needed the farming worlds and it would have been dangerous to let our world wander randomly through space. Otherwise we would not have needed a sun at all."
"So," said Louis Wu. "That's why nobody ever found the puppeteer world."
"This was part of the reason".
"We searched every yellow dwarf sun in known space, and a number outside it. Wait a minute, Nessus. Somebody would have found the farming planets. In a Kemplerer Rosette."
"Louis, they were searching the wrong suns".
"What? You're obviously from a yellow dwarf."
"We evolved under a yellow dwarf star somewhat like Procyon. You may know that in half a million years Procyon will expand into a red giant stage."
"Finagle's heavy hand! Did your sun blow up into a red giant?"
"Yes. Shortly after we finished moving our world, our sun began the process of expansion. Your fathers were still using the upper thigh of an antelope to crack skulls. When you began to wonder where our world was, you were searching the wrong orbits about the wrong suns.
"We had brought suitable worlds from nearby systems, increasing our agricultural worlds to four, and setting them in a Kemplerer Rosette. It was necessary to move them all simultaneously when the sun began to expand, and to supply them with sources of ultraviolet to compensate for the reddened radiation. You will understand that when the time came to abandon the galaxy, two hundred years ago, we were well prepared. We had had practice in moving worlds............"
The five worlds are heading towards the Lesser Magellanic Cloud some 200,000 light years away. A few humans have been allowed to settle on one of the farming worlds. Conservatives use the humans to investigate dangerous regions in the path of the migration.
Hyperwave
Puppeteers have the ability to track ships in hyperspace and communicate through hyperpulse in a gravity well, two feats which baffle Known space scientists. It is suspected the Puppeteers bought these two items of technology from the Outsiders to assist in the second exploration of the Ringworld. In addition, the Puppeteers also have more advanced thrusting systems which can sustain higher accelerations than those units carried by Known Space ships.
Quantum II Hyperdrive
To the Puppeteers, the Quantum II Hyperdrive shunt was a white elephant. It would move a ship a light year in one and a quarter minutes, where conventional hyperdrives would cross that distance in three days. But conventional craft had room for cargo.The drive was housed in a General Products No.4 Hull, the largest hull that the company made. Even so, when the drive was completed, and the scientists and engineers had finished their work, most of the thousand foot sphere of the interior was filled with the machinery of the hyperdrive shunt. The only free space being the ultra-cramped cockpit.
Beowulf Shaefer named the vessel the "Long Shot" and used it to fly to the Core of the Galaxy on a Puppeteer publicity stunt. The trip should have taken 25 days flying at top speed. Once there he transmitted the data from the Core back home to the Puppeteers. When he arrived back in Known Space the Puppeteers had already fled the Core Explosion that the data had shown them occuring, and started the exodus from Known Space. Their trading empire lay in ruins.
Stepping Disks
Earth uses teleportation booths to provide near instantaneous travel throughout the world, but the Puppeteers have created a series of stepping disks on their homeworld and spacecraft which allow them instant travel; they can walk the entirety of their homeworld in minutes, giving them "seven league boots". Unlike the booths, the stepping disks can be installed anywhere and are portable. The General Products Corporation has the rights to manufacture and sell Pelton transfer booths, but have never offered to sell the secret of the stepping disk.
Superconductors
Puppeteers use four different types of superconductors, only two of which are known to humans and Kzinti, and only one of which is susceptible to the superconductor plague launched against Ringworld. They have not sold the secret of the other two superconductors to any party in Known Space.
Most recent revision December 26, 2001